


That Instant of Light

by teaflings



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Post-Canon, Recovery, everyone's favorite co-dependent evil trio, indirect discussion of depression and panic attacks, minus two, surviving the death of your friends and thinking they betrayed you is its own content warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 18:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13253970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teaflings/pseuds/teaflings
Summary: There are nights where he stays awake, looking at the faraway stars outside from the fire escape and tries not to feel weird because here direct daytime starlight is called sunlight and night exists as real darkness and not just slightly dimmed lights in the communal rooms on a space station.Hera says, “Jacobi, we recovered the footage from the airlock."





	That Instant of Light

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you listen to a final episode and then you gotta write some stream of consciousness-type stuff in which you project some of your brain problems onto your favorite character even though he is not great, yknow?
> 
> Title is from Bright Eyes' Train Under Water

What does he think, in the end? In the end he thinks that Alana was the most human of them all. He thinks that she loved minds made of silicone with a fiercely human passion, and he thinks that none of it was meant to make up for the years that a small and frizzy-haired girl was called inhuman. Alana Maxwell is -  _ was _ \- who she was, and he cannot remember a time in which he was not struck by how smart she was and how special she was.    
Alana and he were sometimes similar in some ways, but at the end of the day, she was special and full of heart and he was, at best, a half-feral dog on a leash held by something part bureaucrat, part monster.    
He was alright with that, in a way that he knows is probably more than a little sick and twisted, because it meant that he could keep an eye on her. If he could knew that she was happy, and more importantly safe, with her circuitboard work and her silicone friends, he was content to be half-tame and dangerous.    
He knows that she could take care of herself, but sometimes--

Sometimes he can’t decide if he was meant to be a guard dog or an attack dog, and he can’t decide which would be worse, but he knows, at his core where he can tell that he is lying to himself, day after day after day. Goddard wanted him to be one thing and he was always the other. It was, in some way, coded into his being.    
What he doesn’t know is that the third of their trio of broken things would have understood, in the end.

But he doesn’t know that, won’t ever know that, and so he is alone in knowing that he has failed in what has become his most basic instinct. A dog that has no longer has a need for its nature isn’t worth keeping around, especially if it is incapable of loving a person. He knows that Hera has feelings towards Alana that are best tagged as complicated, and he knows that Minkowski and Lovelace don’t want to have to talk about it, and so he ends up feeling worse, because they’ve worked for so long and so hard to be able to have this, and he is genuinely thrilled for them. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to go home. He just doesn’t want to go home without her.   
He knows as well as any that he isn’t worth keeping around, but he wakes up, the next day and the next day, sometimes gasping for air and more often than not with the sight of her blood burned into the backs of his eyelids, brighter and more tangible than the flash blindness left behind after looking directly at an explosion or a small and alien sun.

  
He makes it back to Earth, survives to look at his own sun in all its beautiful nuclear fusion-tinted orange and to cry the first time that he stands in the rain, because both Alana Maxwell and Warren Kepler liked the way it sounded against windowpanes and the way it muted the rest of the world, but at that moment all he can feel is a confused grief with a horrible sharp clarity.    
he eats Alana’s favorite scones, even though to get them he has to go to a bakery that is far too close a Goddard facility for comfort, and then he goes back to there a few days later to pick up more when the rest of their ragtag crew, version 2.0, come to check in on him. He’s right-- Minkowski and Lovelace both look happier, more at ease, even when they look him in the eyes. It feels a little bit like it would be the betrayal of a secret, and so he doesn’t mention that they were something Alana liked. This works until he is alone with Eiffel, who is learning more and more about the world and his likes and dislikes and how they intersect - or don’t - with his old preferences, but Eiffel is somehow still shiny and new. When Eiffel mentions that he likes the scones, he feels something take root in his throat and it threatens to close off his airways, so he says, somewhat brokenly-   
“She liked them,” and waits until he is sure that his voice will not crack until he continues. “Alana Maxwell, i mean.”   
And then Eiffel waits with him.    
“They were her favorites,” he says, a little more steady. “Sometimes she forgot to eat real food and worked for too long, and then these were the only thing i would bring her that she would eat, even though she complained at me about crumbs in her keyboards, like I had put them there specifically to bother her.”   
This is the most he has spoken about her like he would a friend since they got back to Earth and it hurts a little bit.    
“Oh,” Eiffel says.   
“Yeah,” he says.   
“They’re good,” Eiffel says again and then they sit in silence until it’s time for them to leave.   
He goes out and drinks after that particular conversation, alone at a bar again, but this time nobody talks to him and he orders beer.

  
The next day he is hungover and enjoys a good long moment of self pity when he wakes up to sunlight directly in his eyes because he crashed on the couch. The moment stretches increasingly when he finds that he has no food in his apartment, let alone something greasy enough to fend off his headache, and then he feels outright pathetic when he realizes that he and Eiffel drank the last of his coffee the day before. It takes him at least an hour to talk himself into going to the store, but hunger is on his side and he decides not to shower or change first and spends the entire trip mentally daring moms pushing strollers to judge him and his pajamas with a kind of vindictive glee.   
He has newly acquired bacon and eggs and toast with his coffee, and the eggs are only a little soggy and the toast is only a little burnt on the edges, so he files the day away as a success, takes another painkiller, and goes back to bed.   
It’s not that he eventually settles into a rhythm or a routine. There isn’t much he knows or wants to do, so he spends an indeterminate amount of time floating in a bit of a haze, not wanting to admit to himself just how unfortunately relatable Eiffel’s identity circumstances are. The silver lining of the situation turns out to be that Eiffel has people willing to help him with things, and when Minkowski moved back in with her husband, she adopted the two of them almost immediately. He doesn’t know what happened to Pryce and he doesn’t care. Lovelace doesn’t really have people to come back to, but she has a purpose and what seems like an ability to subsist entirely on vengeance.

  
And so she drafts him into her war against Goddard Futuristics. Mostly he doesn’t talk much and leaves unhelpful sticky notes attached to her paperwork, but sometimes she lets him go and perform what she calls acts of corporate espionage, but he knows them to be leave to go blow up something expensive and mildly to moderately sadistic. He was always very good at his job, and when he doesn’t get caught he grimly thinks that it’s starting to feel natural again. It always comes back to this destruction. 

When Hera finds something significantly more than moderately sadistic, Lovelace says, “Field trip!” and they embark on what is a long and extensively awkward drive. He is enough of an adult not to count the minutes, and he doesn’t ask if they are there yet a hundred times because that would be a little bit too close to the past. 

Lovelace leaves the radio on and they don’t talk about anything but the logistics of their plan.   
They’re back to the car again before Lovelace has him blow the proverbial popsicle stand. The charges that he set go off without a hitch. With Hera still remotely interfering with any nearby security cameras, he stands outside the car and watches as the buildings burn down. He tries very hard not to think about fireworks.   
The trip back takes them five hours and forty eight minutes longer than before, and he thinks unkind thoughts about detours and the people that allow night-time road closures for silly things like construction the entire time.

It turns out that Lovelace likes some of the same music that he did before he left for the Hephaestus. he also finds that she hums under her breath while she drives, not missing a note with the same kind of calculated precision that now colors her hunt for Goddard employees and projects.    
Alana would have preferred to suffer great physical harm rather than give him or Kepler the privilege of choosing music to play during their SI-5 days, but she had the same habit of humming quietly while on the road. He thinks about the trips they took, the hours and hours of staring at straight highways or the fields that bordered them that could have been cut so much shorter if they had taken a plane instead. He tries to distract himself by focusing on Lovelace’s humming, but he finds that the now-unwelcome thoughts of their ‘team bonding’ are still irritatingly compelling. The dark around the car look the same as it was back then, he thinks, and then rolls his eyes at himself. All darkness looks the same, planetside. He won’t think about the stories that Kepler told, but he could write a complete account of the arguments over the music playing through the car’s speakers without a second thought. He loses- even in his own mind he can’t quite hand himself the ratty aux cord that Alana had always claimed as hers, even though within the first half hour of the drive she was inevitably going to end up wearing enormous headphones and listening to entirely different music while typing away from the back seat.

Lovelace looks at him and says, “Hm,” and he looks over at her and realizes that he is wearing a small but genuine smile. “I didn’t realize that my singing was so good,” she tells him, obviously trying not to say something with meaningful weight behind it, “but here you are, grinning like a loon.”

“It most definitely is not-- this,” he says loftily, “ is a grimace of pain.” 

Lovelace grins and then he can’t keep a straight face either.

“Thank you,” she says, and he freezes because this is not in the script. “Tor helping, I mean.”

“You know me,” he says all fake bravado and a refusal to look at her, still trying to decide if this is something that he needs to deflect. “All I’m good at is making things explode.”

She looks back at the road, a dark and poorly lit backway and adjusts the windshield wipers before she answers. “Sure, Jacobi,” she says, and for the life of him all he can think of is being  _ quacked at _ on the Hephaestus. He can’t tell what she’s thinking or what she expects him to say. He waits for a couple of seconds, but Lovelace doesn’t say anything and so he--

“Daniel,” he says, and wonders if he’s done the wrong thing before Lovelace glances back over at him and drops her chin in a barely perceptible nod.

“Sure, Daniel,” she says, and makes him pick the next song that they listen to and then proceeds to mercilessly tear apart his taste in music. They pretend that they both don’t know every word to the song and he is, strangely enough, grateful.

 

He wakes up, maybe a half hour later with his head against the window and the first few seconds of a scream already out of his mouth before he can slap a hand over his own face.

Lovelace looks at him, searching his expression for something. “Yeah,” she says. “Me too.”

“Do Lovelaces not dream of alien sheep?” he quips and sighs as he scrubbs a hand through his hair. “Shit. Yeah.”

On the station, he used to dream of himself, alone, dying just outside of a pod in which Maxwell sits with a slightly chuckling and vicious clone of himself. Sometimes he stuck around long enough after dying to know that the other him tore apart the Hephaestus along with everything and everyone inside of it.

He knows he would have done it, if asked. He was eventually supposed to do it, and he was fine with it. The only thing he wouldn’t have-- couldn’t have done was hurt Alana.

Here, back on Earth and as safe as he could possibly be, he dreams that she was outside of the pod that day. It’s worse, somehow.

A phone rings, startling them both. If he had to put money on it, he would be willing to bet that it’s Minkowski and she’s calling because she expects that neither of them is going to be able to pick up the phone. If he knows Minkowski at all, she’s probably mostly worried about Lovelace, but Lovelace just waves a hand at the bag in the backseat like she expects him to answer.

Once he does have the phone in hand, he picks up and does his intelligence a credit by saying, “Um,” just before Minkowski is bitching them out for being late, fear coloring her voice and he can tell that he was right in guessing she thinks that something went horribly wrong. 

“Relax,” Lovelace says dryly, and he squints at her, unsure of which of them she’s talking to. “I am driving,” she says, “I cannot pick up the phone.” He knows she drives while talking on the phone almost every day.

“Is that Lovelace?” Minkowski demands. “Put her on.”

Lovelace shakes her head at him.

He puts Minkowski on speakerphone.

She rolls her eyes at him.

“She’s driving,” he parrots, still not willing to look away from a clearly scheming Lovelace, “and cannot pick up the phone.”

“Bullshit,” Minkowski says, and he gets his tiny glimmer of satisfaction. “Why are you late? Hera says that you left on time, which means that you were supposed to be back hours ago.”

“Tell Hera to check the traffic reports before you start freaking out next time,” he says, and Lovelace rolls her eyes at him again. “Sorry,” he hisses at her and then says back into the phone, “there was construction on the highway we took down here,” he tries. “We’re taking an alternate route back.”

Minkowski sighs. 

Lovelace says, “I figured Hera would let you know. We’ll tell you if it happens again.”

He does nothing.

“Yeah, okay. Call me if you two need anything,” Minkowski says, obviously more calm now that she’s heard Lovelace’s voice. Lovelace’s face goes fond as Minkowski hangs up and he returns the phone to its place in the backseat.

“Shut up,” she says in response to his silence, still smiling, and he doesn’t ask why she didn’t ask Hera to update Minkowski on their progress.

He isn’t thinking about his dream anymore, he realizes, and looks at Lovelace a little more closely. She catches his side-eyeing and now he thinks her smile is more satisfied than just fond. “Hm,” he says, calling her on it. “Smart.”

“You know me,” Lovelace says, eyes back on the road. “I’m good at being smart.”

He laughs, and thinks that he maybe missed the easy back-and-forth they had before everything went to shit and suddenly people were dead or worried about Eiffel and if they would survive another sublight jump.

He doesn’t realize until much later that he was saying ‘we’ in reference to the future as well. 

 

It doesn’t really get easier after that.

There’s still too much missing, too much empty space on his couch that used to be filled by three people. He can’t sit there anymore without company over, without remembering being bracketed between Kepler, engraved in his memory with his arm slung up on the back of the couch or across his shoulders, and Alana, sometimes with a laptop or tablet in hand if they hadn’t been successful in prying it away from her for their weekly movie nights. She sat sideways with her legs across his lap, still the one that took up the most space between the three of them, the one that most frankly pretended their jobs didn’t matter between them during their off hours.

His friends are dead.

He gets a new couch.

He sits on the floor in his living room when he is alone so that he doesn’t have to look at his new couch.

He pretends that the room he is in doesn’t feel too quiet without them, and he misses them, and then he pretends that he doesn’t feel a more than little guilty because he misses them.

 

He has bad days when he doesn’t leave home, when he doesn’t walk through his front door because he can’t face the thought of being outside where there is no controlled atmosphere. He tries to laugh at how irrational his new fear of dying in space is now that he is  _ no longer in space _ , and yet-- sometimes he just stays inside and breathes. 

He always assumed that he was going to die while in the employ of Goddard. Cutter would keep him alive as long as he needed him, and Kepler would keep him alive, period, maybe, as long as he got shit done and possibly even if he didn’t, but legally speaking, he already was dead, and wasn’t that a right mess once they first made it planetside. Somehow they figured it out, and suddenly his life went from  _ prepare for the worst; keep an escape route open if you can but finish the mission if you can’t  _ to something that he can’t quantify as easily. 

There are nights where he stays awake, looking at the faraway stars outside from the fire escape and tries not to feel weird because here direct daytime starlight is called sunlight and night exists as real darkness and not just slightly dimmed lights in the communal rooms on a space station.

 

He thinks that Goddard -- that Kepler saved his life on that anniversary in that bar and he is so unbelievably angry that the man took that from him too.

 

He eventually asks Hera to do the math as to when the first blue light from Wolf 359 will reach Earth, seven and a half years after the initial event, and then he goes outside the next time that there are no clouds in the night sky and is relieved to find that he cannot see the star, much less discern the color of it. He thinks that this is maybe the first time he has ever given a meaningful fuck about light pollution.

 

Eiffel drops by unannounced a little less than a week later. He comes bearing a slightly awkward invitation to dinner at Minkowski’s house in a few days, and it takes him an amount of time that is probably too long to accept.

There is more silence that neither of them seem to be able to fill and Eiffel says, “Well, uh, I should probably go-”

“Eiffel,” he says, “do I bring anything?”

Eiffel turns back and shrugs. “Nah, just yourself, I think.”

“Okay,” he says, and it’s a pathetic parody of the end of their conversation about Alana’s scones.

 

It takes him a ridiculous amount of time to figure out what he is going to wear.

 

He brings a bottle of red wine and is immediately relieved of it by Lovelace after he knocks on the door. Koudelka shakes his hand, pulls back and eyes him in a manner eerily similar to Minkowski’s, and then the man hugs him. 

“You look like you would have dropped that if she hadn’t taken it,” Minkowski says, watching him him freeze in place before he can wait, confused, for Minkowski’s husband to let him go.

He pulls his composure back into place and shrugs, saying, “I drop nothing, ever, and that was for you, not her.”

“You lie!” Eiffel shouts from the kitchen.

“You let him cook?” he asks Minkowski. “Are you sure the house won’t burn down?”

“Slander!” Eiffel yelps, and then comes into the entryway to greet him. “I’ll have you know that I have not started a kitchen-related fire in at least a week.”

“It’s been longer than that,” Minkowski confides in him.

“He is not cooking,” Koudelka says and claps Eiffel on the back before the both of them disappear back into the kitchen.

“You won’t believe it, but he is,” Lovelace snickers before she ushers them into the living room, where he is deposited into a seat.

“Here, hold this,” Minkowski says and hands him a toaster-sized metallic box. 

“Gee, this is a very nice box,” he says, trying to dull the edge off of his reflexive snark as he realizes he doesn’t know what the hell it is. “Is this supposed to be my birthday present? You shouldn’t have.”

“This is a glorified speaker,” Hera says from his lap, and yikes, that is not something he ever needed to think, thank you very much.

“Eiffel had the idea,” Minkowski explains, “to give her a way to talk to us without having to go through phone or laptop speakers in places that don’t have her wired into the rooms like she is here.”

“It really is mostly just a fancy speaker,” Hera says. “I don’t process anything through it, just project my voice.”

It’s not quite a body, he realizes. Her system is too big to fit inside the shape of a person, but this is a way to give her a more physical presence than reducing her to the voice on the other end of a phone line, and he has to admit that Eiffel’s idea is elegant. 

“We’d like to give you one,” Minkowski says. “To let Hera test the transfer system with some more distance between that piece and the rest of her.”

He looks at the box, turns it over in his hands again. 

“It’s not always on,” Hera says. “There’s a switch to activate the actual microphone hardware inside of the box, and I can’t pick up anything without that.”

“She won’t be moving in,” Lovelace says, still amused.

He shrugs, thinking  _ no complaining _ . He figures that Minkowski will be happier with another way to keep an eye on him, and so he says, “Hey, I gave up the last of my privacy before we fell out of the sky together.”

“We docked in orbit,” Minkowski says, still protective of her navigation skill, “and it was fine.”

 

They have dinner, and that is fine as well.

He takes Hera’s box home, and that feels a little weird but is still mostly fine too.

He installs her on the counter in the kitchen and she runs through the controls for the box with him before he goes to bed.

 

Weeks after, Hera’s voicebox gives a quiet little  _ ding _ and so he goes over to it and hits the button that will let him talk to her and when she speaks she sounds too gentle and he already knows that something is wrong before she says, “Jacobi, we recovered the footage from the airlock,” his stomach drops out of his body as he connects the context clues and he follows it down to sit on the floor, feeling stupid and like an awful cliche.

“Oh,” he says, and doesn’t ask how.

“You don’t have to watch it,” she starts and he sighs and she stops.

“No, Hera,” he says, “I do.”

“It’ll be in your inbox momentarily,” she says, and if he didn’t know better he would almost assume that she had already sent him the videos to save time because all of them must have known he would have wanted to see this immediately.

 

He watches it.

 

He watches it again.

 

He watches the man that he has seen kill enough times for him to lose count put another bullet through someone, one last time, and he watches him  _ die _ .

 

“Are you alright?” Hera asks softly after over an hour’s worth of silence.

He walks over without answering and shuts her box down completely, rubs a hand over his face and doesn’t know what to do. He wonders again if Kepler knew he was saying goodbye that last time. Alana didn’t get the chance to. It’s been months since he had the energy to think that exact thought, but now it feels less like he’s sick with the knowledge that his is a decaying orbit and he has nothing left, and more like a well-worn rock from a riverside sitting in the pit of his stomach. Not comforting, but free of sharp edges. Heavy. Still deadly enough when sufficient force is applied. Alana and Kepler had razor sharp edges. He hopes that his memories of them will retain those.

 

He’ll buy a bottle of too-expensive scotch and have exactly one drink before he will put the bottle onto a shelf and leave it there.

He’ll start to sit sideways on couches during his good days.

Very soon, he will go help Lovelace rain horror in the form of legal paperwork and inquiries onto the heads of the possibly not quite unsuspecting Goddard PR department.

 

Daniel Jacobi can’t start over, can’t make better decisions and can’t make this better, can’t replay his life with more or less kindness, can’t un-kill the people he killed, can’t kill those he let live, can’t fix things, can’t stop hating himself for feeling like life isn’t fair and he’s been abandoned to an inability to consistently look at his own fucking couch and he doesn’t know how this is going to end, can’t know, but maybe he can stop feeling so haunted by his own guilt. Maybe he can learn to feel guilty over the right things. Maybe not.

It’s a start, he guesses, and he thinks of fireworks as he gets up.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact this contains approximately seven hundred instances of the word 'he' and I still can't decide if that's terrible enough to make me edit the entire thing or not.
> 
> Come visit me on tumblr at astralgeckos.tumblr.com if you want to say hi or tell me about how many typos I made at one a.m.


End file.
